Day 5 (Thursday)
Today we entered the Panama Canal to transit from the east to west. We arrived into the east harbor about 6 am and into the canal about 7am, we left the last lock at aprox 5 pm, transit taking about 10 hours. It was an uneventful day as we were going no where very fast. Even at that we spend most of the day hanging over the railing of our balcony to watch the progress of the ships entering and leaving the locks and marvelling at the engineering feat that produced the canal.
One of the interesting things is that the Norwegian Pearl is the largest ship to transit the canal, we are 106 ft wide and the canal is 110 ft wide, our length is 965ft and the lock is just under 1000 ft. As the captain said the first time he made the transit to took a deep breath as he started into the first lock. With the help of the mules we made a touch free passage. The mules are electronic engines that are attached to each ship by cables to keep the ships from drifting in the confines of the locks. We had 8 such mules attached to the Pearl. Additionally we had a pilot board the ship prior to entering the canal. Our pilot was a extremely well spoken female who pointed out the various detail along the way and filled us in on the history of the building process. She stayed on board until we passed under America bridge which signaled that we were entering the Pacific Ocean. As we passed under the bridge we were able to see five oclock traffic in Panama is the same as any city .....gridlocked.
Upon entering the canal zone the temperatures were in the high 80's with the humidity in the mid 90% range, by the time we left the temperature and humidity had dropped considerably.
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